David O. McKay · 1968 October General Conference · 1968-10-04
Transcribed from the official printed Conference Report of the One Hundred Thirty-eighth Semiannual (October 1968) General Conference, digitized by the Church History Library and hosted at the Internet Archive (item conferencereport1968sa), pp. 4-11. Reading order rebuilt from the item's DjVu OCR word coordinates (scripts/ingest/cr-reading-order.py). President McKay, then 95 and under doctor's orders to remain mostly at home, did not deliver this address in person; per the report's own account, "President McKay's address will now be read by his son, Robert," and the calling line under the printed heading reads "(Read by his son Robert R. McKay)." Only the closing paragraph of this address had previously been ingested (as a fragment mislabeled under Elder LeGrand Richards); this pass recovers the full address (index leaf n4-8, "Appreciation for blessings" through "Christ is the light") and merges it with the already-correct closing paragraph. Running heads, page numbers, and leaf markers removed; de-hyphenated line breaks and reflowed paragraphs; printed editorial side-heads preserved as Markdown headings; corrected isolated OCR character errors without altering wording.
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the Internet Archive conferencereport1968sa scan/OCR; confirmed body text, fixed date/session metadata.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: verified source as the Church History Library-contributed Internet Archive scan conferencereport1968sa (138th Semi-Annual Conference, held Fri Oct 4 - Sun Oct 6, 1968). Rebuilt page reading order from the scan's DjVu XML word-coordinate data (scripts/ingest/cr-reading-order.py) and cross-checked every talk boundary against the report's own exhaustive back-of-book index (leaf n153-158). Confirmed speaker attribution and boundary: this address opens the conference (President N. Eldon Tanner: "President McKay's address will now be read by his son, Robert. He will be followed by Elder LeGrand Richards") and closes with the testimony paragraph beginning "ness, but shall have the light of life" that had previously survived as an isolated, mislabeled fragment. A follow-up pass (this session) recovered and merged the full leaf n4-8 body -- previously flagged as never ingested -- ahead of that surviving closing paragraph, restoring the complete address. Collated directly against the reconstructed page text; verbatim from opening to closing 'Amen' with only mechanical OCR/hyphenation cleanup and restoration of the printed side-heads, no paraphrase.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.